Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @04:06PM
from the linus-now-has-license-to-swear-at-more-companies dept.

leppi writes "Nvidia has announced a huge increase in Linux gaming performance for their GeForce R310 drivers after almost a year of development alongside Valve and other game developer partners. Nvidia's announcement also indicated the Steam beta for Linux should be out today. Quoting: 'Available for download at www.geforce.com, the new R310 drivers were also thoroughly tested with Steam for Linux, the extension of Valve's phenomenally popular Steam gaming platform that officially opened to gamers starting today. ... Comparing 304.51 driver performance of 142.7 fps versus 310.14 driver performance of 301.4 fps in beta build of Left for Dead 2. All tests run on the same system using Intel Core i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz with 8 GB memory, GeForce GTX 680 and Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit.'"Update: 11/06 21:00 GMT by S: Valve has gone ahead and announced the Steam for Linux Beta. They've sent invites to a number of people who filled out the application, and they'll be inviting more as the test goes along. The beta test is available for installation on Ubuntu 12.04, with support for other distros to come: "We intend to support additional popular distros in the future; we’ll prioritize development for these based on user feedback."

Hardcore video games have traditionally been one of the sticking points against getting PC users to adopt GNU/Linux. But with big companies (Valve and NVIDIA) committed to bringing hardcore video games to the GNU/Linux platform, what else is in the way of making 2013 the year of the Linux desktop?